Letters

Contact us via e-mail (letters@ocweekly.com), regular mail (Letters to the Editor, OC Weekly, P.O. Box 10788, Costa Mesa, CA 92627) or fax (714-708-8410). Letters will be edited for clarity and length. All correspondence must include your home city and a daytime phone number.

WAR/PEACE/MUNCHING

I would just like to thank you guys for the article "The Education of Corporal Gunderson" (Cover Story, March 7). The image described of charred bodies is something I will not soon forget. I intend to send this article to a number of my unfortunate friends who have wound up in the armed forces overseas and are preparing to fight an "enemy" that has been armed by our own government. Truly an inspiring tale worthy of a place in the local proponent of dissidence, the OC Weekly.

Wayne Limburg
Santa Ana

In your list of 67 things to know before the war starts ("War College," Feb. 28), you said that Katherine Lee Bates' "America the Beautiful" is set to the tune of "God Save the Queen." That's incorrect. "God Save the Queen" became "My Country 'Tis of Thee."

Eugene Marner
via e-mail

The editor responds:Thanks for the heads-up, Eugene. An embarrassing and careless mistake on our part since, like everybody, we know that "America the Beautiful" is set to the tune of "Slowride." Take it easy.

Thanks to OC Weekly for scurrilous but pithy commentary in revealing the emperor's scanty dress. So much of the popular support for Bush's war smacks of snide adolescent jocks enjoying whup-ass locker-room banter over the upcoming game against the crosstown Iraqi rivals, wagering that braggadocio and bravado will proxy for schlong length or testosterone levels superior to all the misguided, candy-assed liberal wusses. Sept. 11 was a national tragedy, and its effects reverberate still, yet though most of the world has been sympathetic, the American public's willingness to watch hell visited on others while munching snacks in front of our TVs will not be remembered kindly by history. We can't rub Third World noses in our wealth, alternately ignoring the UN or jawboning it—and then claim the right to absolute safety in our beds while they must suffer poverty and its dislocations. If we do, we will have become as decadent as the Jihadist wackos claim.

Gary Russell Collins
Santa AnaLONG LOST LOFT

Thank you for your brief article exposing the irony of Santa Ana's subsidized "artists' lofts" (Nick Schou's "Lofty Ambitions," March 7). I am a 28-year-old Orange County native who just happens to be a painter when I'm not working my 50-to-60-hour-per-week, to-make-ends-meet, corporate, sales job. About six months ago, I investigated the affordability of these live/work spaces in hopes that my studio and apartment rent could be combined into a single payment while allowing me to stop paying somebody else's mortgage. Imagine my surprise when I discovered these homes marketed to artists and "the creative class" were as outrageously priced as a Mission Viejo tract home. (Who can afford this shit, anyway?) I count myself lucky to have recently landed a job transfer to Austin, Texas, where I can finally purchase a home/studio space for one-third to one-half the price of these so-called "affordable" dwellings. It is with great excitement that I am leaving this overdeveloped, oversprawled wreck of a once-great county and taking my consumer spending and taxes, as well as my creative class, with me. Love it or leave it. . . . I am slowly learning when to jump ship. Now maybe I can actually paint more.

Mark T
via e-mailGETTING IT STRAIGHT

In the item regarding the Nativo Lopez recall, "ME-OW!" (A Clockwork Orange, Feb. 28), Matt Coker states that Jeff LeTourneau is "of gay-lobbying Elections Committee of the County of Orange and Eleanor Roosevelt Democratic Club fame." This is incorrect in that Mr. LeTourneau is not a member of ERDC and does not speak for it in any fashion. Mr. LeTourneau's comments should be attributed solely to himself and to ECCO.

Matt Coker replies:After I read this letter, I e-mailed Ms. Manley to apologize for my stupid reporting error. I felt I should do the same for Mr. LeTourneau, but he got back and swore that he has been an ERDC member for nearly 20 years—since the group's first meeting. He added that he pays more in dues than the basic ERDC membership, that he still regularly attends their functions and that they gave him an award for his community activism. "The only correct assertion in her letter," LeTourneau writes, "is that, as I am not an officer, I do not speak for the organization, which your article never claimed in the first place." My only assertion is: Can't we all just get along?

CONFIDENTIAL TO:

Markie, FC, Dojo and all the others who wrote objecting to Steve Lowery's characterization of Bruce Springsteen singing "London Calling" on the Grammy Awards as objectionable ("Diary of a Mad County," March 7): Look, I like Springsteen. In fact, the only objectionable thing about Springsteen is you guys—40- and 50-year-old, jeans-wearing, lower-lip-biting, man-girls who swoon and dissect his every word and believe only Bruce understands you and vice versa. Admit it: you want to date him. Yeah, you want to be his girlfriend, you little E-Street tramps. You want big Bruce to take you into his leather-clad arms, coo about New Jersey, and then throw you over a burned-out Chevrolet and repeatedly take it to your backstreets. Bruuuuuuuuuuce.